Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/182

170 day and the fat buds of the (Chestnut were bursting into magnificent green plumes. Two well-dressed "misses," aged, I should say, about nine and eleven, were taking their correct morning walk. The elder called the attention of the younger to one of the trees, pointing to it. The younger exclaimed in a highly shocked tone, "O Maud (or was it 'Mabel'?), you know you shouldn't point!" The notion of perpetrating a rudeness on the chestnut tree was funny enough. But the incident is instructive as illustrating the childish tendency to stretch and generalize rules to the utmost.

The domain of prayer well illustrates the same tendency. The child envisages God as a very, very grand person, and naturally therefore extends to him all the courtesies he knows of. Thus he must be addressed politely with the due forms, "Please," "If you please," and so forth. The German child shrinks from using the familiar form "Du" in his prayers. As one maiden of seven well put it in reply to a question why she used "Sie" in her prayers: "Ich werde doch den lieben Gott nicht Du nennen: ich kenne ihn ja gar nicht." Again, a child feels that he must not worry or bore God (children generally find out that some people look on them as bores), or treat him with any kind of disrespect. C objected to his sister's remaining so long at her prayers, apparently on the ground that, as God knew what she had to say, her much talking would be likely to bore him. An American boy of four on one occasion refused to say his prayers, explaining: "Why, they're old. God has heard them so many times that they are old to him too. Why, he knows them as well as I do myself." On the other hand, God must not be kept waiting. "O mamma," said a little boy of three years and eight months (the same that was so insistent about the kissing and hand-shaking), "how long you have kept me awake for you! God has been wondering so whenever I was going to say my prayers." All the words must be nicely said to him. A little boy aged four years and nine months once stopped in the middle of a prayer and asked his mother, "Oh, how do you spell that word?" The question is curious as suggesting that the child may have envisaged his silent communications to the far-off King as a letter. In any case it showed painstaking and the wish not to offend by slovenliness of address.

Not only do children of themselves extend the scope and empire of rule; they show a disposition to make rules for themselves. If a child that is told to do a thing on a single occasion only is found repeating the action on other occasions, this seems to show the germ of a law-making impulse. A little boy of two years and one month was once told to give a lot of old toys to the children of the gardener. Some time after, on receiving some new toys.